What Is The What

Deng is still tied up on the floor. He speaks again to Michael. Michael goes to get a towel and a textbook to drop on Deng, who quickly agrees to be quiet if the boy will stop dropping things on him. Michael builds a fortress of couch cushions around Deng, in order to ignore him more successfully. Deng thinks back to the beginning of the war, wishing the boy had more respect and had seen what Deng himself had.

Deng was helping his mother in the kitchen, when helicopters came to the village. He watched as the adults began to run from them. The helicopters fired their machine guns and killed people at random. Deng’s mother pulled him back inside and they hid under the bed, listening in terror as the helicopters continued their massacre. In the end, thirty people had been murdered. The next morning, the army arrived with trucks full of soldiers, who quickly went to work burning down Marial Bai. Any men who resisted were shot. Deng notes that “the rebels for whom this was retribution were nowhere to be found” (76).